I am a taxpayer and a responsible handgun owner. While I have never had cause to fire a weapon at another human being, I do participate in competitive target shooting and can put a full clip of .45 caliber slugs in a single hole at 30 feet. I can manage this feet despite only practicing with my handgun once or twice a month. This is why I am absolutely horrified by the intolerably poor marksmanship exhibited by the Seattle Police Department in this incident.

Police in Seattle carry semi-automatic 9mm Glocks. While Glocks are not the most accurate weapons out of the box, they are extremely reliable and fairly accurate. The Glocks Moreover, the ammunition used in police weapons is the Remington Golden Saber, specifically selected because it is accurate even when fired though a windshield. One of the patrol cars had rammed the other, so they had to be at very close range, and still no one got hit.

This is just appalling.

My tax dollars have help to maintain a shooting range in Tukwila, Washington for exclusive use by the Seattle Police Department. I guess my tax dollars are simply being wasted, as it is perfectly obvious that the officers involved in this incident hadn't been practicing their marksmanship. What's worse is that the shootout occurred in a residential area, so those 20 slugs that missed their intended target could easily have hit an innocent bystander in their home.

Now it is quite obvious that mistaking a police car full of uniformed officers for a stolen police vehicle is going to remain a rare occurrence. After all, police cars are rarely stolen. Incidents where policemen are called upon to fire their weapons in self defense are much more common, and it is a crying shame that the criminal element in the Pacific Northwest has no reason to fear the boys in blue. If the thin blue line can't hit the broadside of a barn, how can they discourage lawlessness.

I have written the Mayor's office calling for increased standards of marksmanship on the part of the police as well as longer hours of target practice. I hope that all of you in the Seattle area will do the same. The rule of law is important to all citizens and it must be backed by the threat of deadly force, not merely the threat of loud popping noises.

I recently went target shooting with my father (he's got the guns, I own none - for now). One of the guns was a Glock 9mm. That thing was always jamming up or getting the shell casing stuck in the ejector port. I can't imagine using that in a firefight. For a gun consumer, it's a waste of money. If you need a large ammo supply in the magazine, a nice 1911 .45 ACP would be a good start. If you want accuracy, an S&W .38/.357mag revolver is excellent. I was using the mag shells and was able to consistently hit a bullseye at 100 yards. With .38 shells, 50 yards was no problem.

I can't understand that even at that range no one get hit. Maybe they were hiding behind their doors - I know I would if someone started shooting at me. Were the door panels riddled with dents?

It's not that the policemen involved in this circular firing squad were merely bad shots. I mean, twenty-plus bullets! At close quarters, nearly point-blank! It's a miracle that neither of them got killed!

Or rather, not a miracle, but a law of nature.

What's a matter you, Shoeboy? Don't you go to the movies? Don't you watch TV? The movies and the teevee have been trying to teach you something for years, and you still haven't learned? Why even Eric S. Raymond has absorbed this wisdom, and as we all know, he's, ah, shall we say, distracted.

The natural fact is, virtue is a shield against bullets. I know that's hard for a modern atheistic person to digest, though it was self-evident to the boy soldiers of Iran during their '80s war with Iraq. Considering how tough a sell it's going to be, that's why the almighty media do not simply plop this notion before you as a bare fact, as though it were something simple and readily comprehensible, like the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics. Instead, having consideration for your delicate sensibility and limited credulity, they slip it to you as a myth.

Here's just one example of the myth. Dja ever see the movie Rambo? OK, don't tune out yet, I know you're saying, "Rambo?! That, that, that trashy trash! How common, how plebian, how declasse!" Oh indeed I share your distaste. But still, be still and listen awhile. There's a scene in Rambo where our steroid-freak hero is running through the jungle (cue up John Fogerty) with, get this, a fifty-cal cradled in his muscular arms. (Of course in real life if a guy picked up a fifty-cal in his arms in Vietnam and managed to hold on while squeezing the trigger, the recoil would bounce him all the way to Honolulu. Sure the circumstances are false, it's a myth, remember?) He bursts into an opening cut out in the underbrush. (Yeah, right, typical Vietnamese in postwar Vietnam hang out in junglee clearings. But hey it's a myth!)

Standing here and there in the clearing are approximately one hundred fiendish VC soldiers. These are extras. They are disposable! Well, each of these Mao-capped fiends is toting the famous Kalashnikov AK-47 automatic rifle. Yes, the one which, during the Vietnam War, our soldiers (real soldiers amidst genuine mortal combat, mind you, not mere mythical characters) would toss away their shiny new overpriced jam-o-matic M-16s and use these instead, because they shoot so damn good.

They (the VC fiends in concert) take one look at Monsieur Rimbaud's sweat-gleaming bulging musculature, non-yellow skin, and fold-free epicanthes, and then they all cry out as one (in Vietnamese of course) "Holy s&^%t! It's that f*%$#n Uncle Sam!" and with that free-n-easy lack of fire control that's so characteristic of movie extras, they all open fire at once. Now think about it. One hundred enemies, three hundred rounds a minute, one target. That's five hundred rounds per second, a rate of fire roughly comparable to that of a minigun.

This is where the miracle of virtue comes into play. If they were blasting away at something neutral and inanimate, such as a paper target, even if all those Orientals were stink-o out of their minds drunk on sake so they were firing literally at random - some straight up, some down into the dirt, some directly into their own feet, knees or chests - it only stands to reason that n bullets distributed across the entire sphere, times the surface angle of a target with an aspect of k steradians divided by four pi, when you run n to a high enough number, is going to result in the statistical near certainty of a hit somewhere on that target. But they are not firing at paper. They are firing at a good guy.

And that, simply enough, is the essence of the miracle. You just can't hit a good guy. No matter how many rounds you fire. Conversely, you can't miss a bad guy, or in the example above, you can't miss all the bad guys. For don't you remember the denouement of that exciting scene? Yes, by the Good Lord, by the time the director yelled "Cut," every last one of those little yellowy-red devils had been struck by unscathed mighty Rimbaud's shreiking fifty-caliber rounds, and was lying face down in the clearing, bleeding, dying or dead! Virtue always triumphs!

Well, that explains the peculiar doings in Seattle. Fear not, Shoeboy! Contrary to appearances, you and your fellow Seattlites are being protected by qualified shooters! All that practice down at the Tukwila range would surely have paid off, had the circumstances been such that they were shooting at someone other than a good guy. If their target had been, rather than a fellow virtuous Boy in Blue, instead, say, an immigrant street vendor, why they might not have hit with every round, but I'd bet anything they'd have scored a good, say, seventeen out of forty-one.

You are so incredibly verbal and witty. Your mother must be very proud of you.

{:-)

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